Easter Music

Seven years ago last month we moved to Nashville. After we got the truck unloaded and spent a week settling in with help from family, Easter was upon us. To me Easter meant music. What was I going to do for my Easter music in this new place? One crossroad in our end of town sports three large churches, one of them Baptist, which was our background. A Baptist church ought to have good Easter music, I reasoned, so that’s where we showed up on Palm Sunday.

I was right. The choir was “classic” and impressive, but the special music took my breath away. A talented young tenor, in costume, performed “Watch the Lamb!” I was hooked. We returned the next Sunday, and a man and woman, both with powerful voices, sang the Mary Magdalene song titled “I’ve just seen Jesus.” Except for worshipping with our son’s family at their church from time to time, we’re still where we started out.

Last Sunday that same tenor, a few years older now and the father of a little girl, was part of a breathtaking male quartet that sang the Gaither song, “I Believe in a Hill Called Mount Calvary.” We were delighted when they sang it again last evening at our Good Friday service. I think the Gaithers outdid themselves in “poetic” with the line about “And when time has surrendered and earth is no more, I’ll still cling to that old rugged cross”!

At least two other Gaither songs have powerful messages for the Easter season. I’ve long loved the dramatic one about the crucifixion, with the chorus, “It…is…finished, the battle is over…” ending with “It is finished, and Jesus is Lord.” The first words of the second verse have gripped my heart afresh these last two days:

“But in my heart the battle was raging; not all prisoners of war had come home. There were battlefields of my own making—I didn’t know that the war had been won.”

Someone in our extended family is right now in the clutches of battlefields of his own making and doesn’t seem able to grasp that the war has been won. It gives me a new perspective for praying for him.

I can’t mention Gaither music and Easter without including “Because He Lives.” If you don’t know the story of how Bill and Gloria wrote it in connection with the birth of their third baby, you need to look it up. We used it at the last two funerals in our family, but it’s message is so much broader. No matter what the turmoil around us these days—personally, nationally, or any other dimension, we can face tomorrow because our Savior lives. Knowing that He holds the future makes our lives worth living—tomorrow and all the days beyond.

Here is just one of several websites about the Gaithers: http://www.praisegathering.com/Site/9/

Tracking Down the Music

After my friend Pat read Tangled Strands, she started asking me about the music. She wanted to know the melody that went with the words. I had never had or seen music for it, but the melody was clearly in my mind and I could sit down and play it by ear on the piano. However, since I live in middle Tennessee and Pat was in South Dakota, that didn’t do her any good.

Pat searched the Internet with no success. I asked my sister to go through our mother’s old song books, many of them from the 1950s. Nothing. So I posted on the boarding-school discussion group asking if anyone remembered the song—and bingo! Corky not only remembered it, he remembered the trio that sang it. One of the trio members is active in the current group, and we have her e-mail, so I wrote her. A prompt response from her husband. told me Mary Jean was in another state with a daughter waiting to deliver a baby. So I had to wait for her to get home.

Meanwhile, the question had come up about copyright issues. If the song was still under copyright, there was no way I could quote from it in my story. Ouch. My mind started churning with how I could possibly communicate the message of the song without quoting the words.

After Mary Jean got home, she searched her trio books—and she found it! She also found that the title of the song was not “Tangled Strands.” Its actual title was the first word in the chorus—“Transformed.” We had a school reunion coming up in a few months, so we waited until I saw Mary Jean then. That’s when I got the music to my song – and Pat got it, too.

Getting the music gave me, for the first time, the name of the author—a Mrs. F.G. Burroughs, and it gave me a copyright date, 1920. Even though the copyright was renewed in 1948 by a music company, both those dates were old enough that it had a good chance of being in the public domain. A fellow member of my local writers’ group works in music copyright, and she could not find it. Recently I learned on an Internet site that anything older than 1922 is in the public domain.

Whew!